Producers: Gavin Brivik and James Newberry   Director: Len Wiseman   Screenplay: Shay Hatten  Cast: Ana de Armas, Anjelica Huston, Gabriel Byrne, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Norman Reedus, Keanu Reeves, Ian McShane, Lance Reddick, Sharon Duncan-Brewster, Victoria Comte, David Castañeda, Ava McCarthy, Abraham Popoola, Magdalena Sittova, Sooyoung Choi, Juliet Doherty, Marc Cram and Robert Maaser    Distributor: Lionsgate

Grade: C

These days it’s virtually axiomatic that any successful action movie will metastasize, and “John Wick” certainly has.  Since its debut in 2014 the movie has spawned three direct sequels, a comic book prequel series “The Book of Rules” and a spin-off streaming series, “The Continental.”  “Ballerina” is the first feature spin-off, equipped with the pre-title “From the World of John Wick,” presumably to assure devotees that they weren’t going to be exposed to some arty ballet film.  (As it turns out, “Swan Lake”—which seems the only ballet Hollywood moviemakers are aware of, apart from “The Nutcracker,” though the latter might be appropriate given the number of groin kicks the heroine applies to her male opponents—is the sole ballet alluded to here, and then only in brief snippets.)  It also includes appearances by some “Wick” veterans, including the man himself: it could, it fact, be the first in a multitude of installments focusing on other hit-people with whom he came in contact during his long career.

The protagonist in this case is Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas), who, as a child (Victoria Comte), witnessed her beloved father Javier (David Castañeda) killed by a squad of thugs led by a dark figure later revealed as The Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne).  Orphaned Eve is befriended by Winston Scott (Ian McShane), who takes her to the ballet school run by The Director (Anjelica Huston) of Wick’s Ruska Roma crime clan; and though Eve doesn’t excel at dance, she proves formidable in the school’s other curriculum in assassination, where Nogi (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) proves a most perceptive mentor in drumming into her that while she might not be able to go toe-to-toe with brutish men physically, there are other ways for young ladies to win.

And fight she must, first as a bodyguard to a young woman being threatened by a criminal gang.  But in performing her duties, the memory of her father’s death is triggered by a tattoo of an “X” on one of the villains she kills.  She learns that the tattoo signifies membership in The Chancellor’s cult, a group that kills for pleasure as much as cash, with which Ruska Roma has long maintained a modus vivendi.  Despite admonitions from The Director and Winston, Eve is determined to track down The Chancellor and take her revenge. 

The search takes her to a hotel in Prague that’s part of the Continental universe, where she breaks into the suite of Daniel Pine (Norman Reedus), who has a bounty on his head from The Chancellor not just for leaving the cult but taking his daughter Ella (Ava McCarthy)—The Chancellor’s granddaughter—with him.  When The Chancellor’s squad, led by a sinister, black-garbed woman named Lena (Catalina Sandino Moreno) invades the suite, Eve assists Pine against them, seeing Javier in Daniel and herself in Ella.  In the ensuing melee Pine is wounded and Ella abducted.

Eve has now gone rogue, and a bounty is put on her head.  But that doesn’t deter her from following the trail to Hallstatt, a snowy mountain town in Austria where all the inhabitants constitute a fighting force loyal to The Chancellor.  Eve must fight not only them, but a Ruska Roma heavyweight sent in to restore the uneasy truce with The Chancellor by liquidating her.

This second half of the film is just an endless series of battles against an apparently limitless array of enemies.  Except for the locale, however, it represents little change from the earlier part of the picture, which began with the protracted sequence of Javier fighting off The Chancellor’s men and continued through Eve’s initiation mission, the mayhem in Prague and an assault on a munitions shop run by a helpful guy named Frank (Abraham Popoola) where she stopped to pick up weaponry for her trip to Hallstatt.  The problem with these fight sequences is that while they’re all reasonably well choreographed by director Len Wiseman and his team and competently shot by cinematographer Romain Lacourbas, and possess some momentary bits of humor, they’re basically conventional from a visual perspective; apart from the initiation fight, set in a glitzy nightclub, they lack the psychedelically colorful pizzazz of the action sequences in the “Wick” movies.

The same observation applies to the virtually non-stop battles in Hallstaat. A couple of them show some flair—a confrontation with a variety of attackers in a café/souvenir shop and the capper, a duel with flame throwers and hoses against The Chancellor’s chief henchman Dex (Robert Maaser).  Both go on far too long, though, with editors Nicholas Lundgren and Jason Ballantine allowing them to drag on mercilessly, and even the mano-a-mano with the dude from Ruska Roma, though agreeably short, lacks any real distinction.  There’s also an “Empire Strikes Back” sort of revelation toward the close, but it amounts to a limp little blip.  The flamethrower episode probably holds a cinematic record, however, for the most people shown being incinerated; if only Smell-O-Vision were still around, the theatre could be filled with the odor of burning flesh for fifteen minutes or so.

Of course the action sequences in the “John Wick” movies were very long too, but those pictures were enlivened by Reeves’s characteristically zonked-out demeanor.  De Armas handles the physical demands of her role well (she and her stand-ins, that is), but she really doesn’t bring much to the party beyond a look of steely determination, and that gets rather tiresome over the course of two long hours.  The presence of familiar faces—Reeves, Huston, McShane and Reddick—can only do so much, and for the most part the new characters—Lena and Pine in particular—aren’t very interesting, and neither Sandino Moreno nor Reedus can do much with them.  But Popoola, as the put-upon weapons dealer, Magdalena Sittova, as a militant waitress in the Hallstaat café, and Marc Cram, as the exasperated manager of the Prague hotel, all offer welcome, if fleeting, moments of wry humor.  Byrne, on the other hand, can do little with the one-note part of the gloomy, vampiric Chancellor. 

“Ballerina” has been afforded a generally top-notch look.  Production designer Philip Ivey gives everything a niftily artificial appearance, especially in the Hallstatt section, and Lacourbas endows his work, and the costumes by Tina Kalivas, with a glossy glow.  One has to put up, however, with an exceptionally irritating synthesizer score by Tyler Bates and Joel J. Richard, which pounds on remorselessly throughout; it’s really a relief when a snatch of Tchaikovsky pops in occasionally.

Though bloated and unrelenting, “Ballerina” will undoubtedly do big business on the basis of the Wick connection, and probably spawn sequels of its own.  But apart from the change of protagonist it never manages to develop a profile of its own that would help it stand out from the previous pictures in the franchise, and in most respects it’s inferior to them.